MALCOLM TALKS MOVIES:
DRIB
DIRECTED BY: Kristoffer Borgli
"In late 2014, videos began to surface on the internet of a Norwegian man instigating fights with strangers in public. Taunting strangers into lashing out and assaulting him, his only clear goal seemed to be viral fame, which he quickly achieved. He became one of the countless “microsecond celebrities” internet culture has become so skilled at crafting.
What no one knew, was that the man was actually an Andy Kaufman-esque comedian named Amir Asgharnejad, and these completely staged fight videos were his most recent performance piece.
Shortly after his videos spread across the net, a Los Angeles ad agency reached out to him requesting his participation in an ad campaign for an unnamed energy drink. He happily obliged, hopping on a plane and heading for LA.
DRIB is a recreation of those events. Well, not quite. DRIB is a recreation of those events starring Amir Asgharnejad as himself. Well… not quite. DRIB is a recreation of those events starring Amir Asgharnejad as himself, while also being a documentary about the film’s production. Sound confusing? It should. Surprisingly, DRIB's director, Kristoffer Borgli, deftly weaves between the multitude of timelines with a skill and tact that is rarely found in a first time feature director. You’re never confused, and you’re never lost… except for when you should be.
This control over the audience's confusion is exactly what makes DRIB so singular. You never really know exactly where that line blurs. The entire film is gleefully aware of the fact that as an audience member you are frequently left questioning where the line between Fiction and Non-Fiction is drawn, and toys with this convention continuously.
As a viewer, this sensation of constantly struggling to define the line between reality and fabrication on your own is a cognitively dissonant experience that seems to only prompt one final takeaway: there's no way of knowing for sure.
This fixation on truth and its subjectivity in contemporary media seems to be a constant theme in Borgli’s work, and one that is especially topical with the rise of social media, reality television, and a general societal fascination with broadcasting and consuming “the truth”.
By reconstructing “true” events, only to then deconstructing the actual construction of them, Borgli seems to be prompting us to enter a house of mirrors, where the only realization is that “truth” is bullshit, and nothing matters. Or, at the very least, that people attempting to create "the truth” is boring.
This commitment to melding fiction and nonfiction rings true not only within the feature, but throughout its release. Due to (obvious) legal troubles, the production could not use the actual energy drinks image in the story. So, they created a fake one. For most filmmakers, that would be enough. But Borgli decided to run a full length ad campaign for the fake energy drink as part of the promotion for the film. These campaigns were so realistic that numerous ad agencies thought that Drib was an actual energy drink which was heading to market.
All this work speaks to what makes Kristoffer Borgli such a fascinating figure in the current media landscape. His fascination with satirizing an industry he is actively involved in, and his commitment to having a film that should be a recreation be anything BUT all point toward the fact that he is carving out his own niche in contemporary cinema. One defined by defying the deepest held convention of story telling: what is real, and what is fabricated.
Generally, films this committed to exploring themes like the subjectivity of truth are bogged down by the sheer weight of the concept. They become inert, slow, and often difficult to engage with. This couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to Drib. Borgli never lets his ruminations on reality come before the story, and the end result is a film who's story, performances, and visual style are fresh, hilarious, and engaging throughout.
To describe Drib as “weird” would, frankly, be a disservice. The term weird doesn’t even begin to encompass the scope of this project, nor the genius of the creative at its helm."
Drib is available to stream on Amazon Prime